


Everything You Touch Surely Dies

by Snarky_Muffins



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Bar fights, Character Study, Gen, Illusions to Drug Usage, Mentions of George Kirk, Mentions of Underage Sex, Pre-Movie, Skipping School, Underage Drinking, mentions of child abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-23
Updated: 2014-05-23
Packaged: 2018-01-26 06:21:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1677959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snarky_Muffins/pseuds/Snarky_Muffins
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>James Kirk could never recall much of his childhood.</p><p>Excerpt: The aching thoughts he had of his childhood were limited to boozy blurs and school, the only time of the day he wasn't at a bar, or in the barn shooting up. He could remember every scowl on the teachers' face with every snide remark and the look they gave him when his scores were off the charts. He could remember trudging to school each day down the beaten and worn backroads of Iowa, feet kicking up dust and a cheery, yet oddly melancholy, song on his lips. The only sound within miles of echoing silence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything You Touch Surely Dies

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: Non graphic child abuse, bar fight, mentions of drug usage, underage drinking, and underage sex.
> 
> A/N: This is kind of a character study of Jim and his childhood, especially his thoughts on it leading up to when he meets Pike in the bar. None of this is actually set in real facts, so a lot is taken from my imagination. Unbetaed.

James could never recall much of his childhood. It was all a flash of cracked skin, pulled taut over knuckles and fists flying and screams he didn't register as his own. It was all darkness, a yawning, lonely night plagued by ghosts and demons. His adolescent years were even more blurred. It was all drunken nights and boisterous laughing and shots and bets and getting knocked out of his bar stool. It was all speeding down a highway with a half empty bottle of vodka and some twenty year old girl in his passenger seat, passed out, wearing stilettos and a short party dress.

The aching thoughts he had of his childhood were limited to boozy blurs and school, the only time of the day he wasn't at a bar, or in the barn shooting up. He could remember every scowl on the teachers' face with every snide remark and the look they gave him when his scores were off the charts. He could remember trudging to school each day down the beaten and worn backroads of Iowa, feet kicking up dust and a cheery, yet oddly melancholy, song on his lips. The only sound within miles of echoing silence. 

If there was one thing, and one thing alone, Jim missed about Iowa it was the silence, the solitude, the feeling of flying as you cruised down an empty road on your motorcycle. Despite always being alone, despite the times he prayed until his knees ached for Sam to come back, at the end of the day there was nothing like crawling out of his window and spreading out on the roof, watching twilight transition into the pitch black of night.

His mother would have detested if she'd known about the nights he spent on the rooftop, just watching comets flash across the sky and stars flare brightly in the distance, wondering if something else, something more than Iowa, even existed. But she was never home, and he'd stopped seeing her as real maternal figure when he was seven. She left, time and time again. It wasn't as if Frank -his stepdad- even cared what Jim did so long as he didn't get in the man's way. 

When his mother did come back, on those dreary, boggy mornings and greeted the suddenly jovial Frank, Jim stayed in the barn. His mother had been a country girl all her life, but after the time she spent with this big fancy job, in some big fancy ship, in some big fancy city or another, she'd forgotten the simple joys of the smell of hay and grain. In fact, if she didn't have to, she wouldn't step outside of the house unless the shuttle was here to bring her away again. 

Jim was okay with that. He was fine with laying back in the hayloft with a stalk hanging out of his mouth and his muddy boots kicked up. His mother, at first, looked for him, calling out 'Jimmy! Jimmy!' As if he was still five and wanted his mother's attention. After a while of tense and rare interactions, she caught on. No one could ever claim his mother wasn't sharp. 

So she ignored him now, backed off and gave him his space. Jim felt bad at first, and whenever he did he reminded himself of how his mother was when Sam was still around. He was, to his mother, the second best to Sam. And now Sam was gone and it was just him and Frank and occasionally mother. 

Through her glassy, faraway blue eyes Jim could see the way she looked at him. She was trying to place Sam's less rugged features on his face, picture him as older, with darker sandy hair. Sam was the last thing she had of her husband. 

It should bother Jim that she always looked at every picture of Sam she had, brushing her thumb over his face, knowing she'd probably never see him again, but it didn't. Jim was used to it. They celebrated Sam birthday every year, with cake and candles and presents and Happy Birthday! balloons. Jim never had a birthday party. 

Mother was always sick, or too tired, or just refused to come out of her room. Sam, when he got older, to his late teens, snapped at mom. Called her selfish. He'd beat his fists on her door and demand she come out and celebrate his little brother's birthday. She never did, she never said anything, and the next day it was like nothing happened. 

Jim knew it was because George, his father, died on that day. Saving lives, everybody always told him. Being a good man and doing something respectable. Being someone Jim would never, ever be. And Jim accepted that fact. Embraced it really. He showed it by getting drunk and breaking the law and driving under the influence. He skipped school, talked back to teaches, did everything everybody told you not to. And everybody said he'd never get anywhere in his life.

Yet he was always there for every exam. He passed them all with no questions wrong. He could read a college textbook in seventh grade. He could do calculus in eighth. By his freshman year, he could speak French and Spanish. And nobody knew why. Jim didn't even know why. 

He never sat at home listening to the Rosita Stone, or flipping through college calculus text books. He went home, grabbed his motorcycle, and went anywhere else in the world. Yet, he learned all these things. Later he'd find out it was from exposure, and later he'd find out that everybody was wrong, but that was much later. 

Jim didn't hate people. He was always too drunk to even comprehend the meaning of hate, and he never remembered whom he meant the previous night in the morning. He didn't hate his mother, he didn't hate Sam (if he had been older he would've jumped ship too) and no, he didn't even hate Frank. He didn't hate these people because they hated him. Frank was abusive, his mother treated him like the creature that just crawled out of the gutter, and his brother left him with little more than a note. 

The only person Jim ever hated was his father. His father whom probably loved him. His father whom helped create him. His father whom was the core off all the suffering he's been through in his years. It was his father everyone expected him to be like because his father died saving his newborn life. If was his father this and his father that, and the award for the biggest disgrace? James Kirk.

Jim hated the man he never knew, hated the man who so selfishly gave his life so ensure a horrible one for Jim. What was it? A security? Was his father a masked sadist under the cerulean glow of his eyes in those pictures mom hung everywhere? 

Jim never knew him and for that he was grateful. If he had, he'd lay one across the man's chiseled jaw. It was his fault their family crumbled like a dilapidated building. It was his fault Sam ran away and mom married Frank. Jim blamed him for his useless, pointless, utterly wasted childhood. 

His salvation when he was twenty four came in the angelic form of Christopher Pike. The man was graying when Jim met him, years of hard times etched into his iris'. Jim was at a bar in some washed out town in Iowa, minding his own business, talking a a young woman with hair like a chocolate waterfall and skin the same color, when one thing led to another and he was being pounded into the ground by fists and and feet, ruthlessly beating him until his vision blurred with his own blood. He remembered the minute panic attack he had when the blood became thick and sluggish in his mouth, clogging up his throat. He could picture the cerise blood pooling into his lungs, slowly drowning him in his own life essence. 

They there were hands pulling at the front of his shirt, pulling him to his feet. His head spun and his stomach sloshed, his nose overwhelmed by the scent of copper blood in the air. He coughed and sputtered, ropes of sanguine mist spraying across his fade and his beater's face. He heard Chris whistle, a distant rumble in the back of his brain as he worked to clear his airway. The hands holding him abruptly let him go. He feel back on the table, rolling onto his side, coughing and heaving for air. It had been a while since he'd taken a beating like that. 

He managed to wobble to the bathroom while Chris had a heart to heart with the bullies. His face a gruesome sight; blood leaking out of both nostrils, his broken nose bent at a sickeningly unnatural angle, slick red blood matted his dirty blond hair to his forehead, which was littered with cuts and bruises. Both of his blue eyes, cerulean like his father's, were nearly swollen shut. An long cut bleed profusely on his cheek, arching down towards his jawline. Lemon yellow puss as well as saliva coated his face, mixing in with his watery blood. 

He dampened a paper towel and brought it up to his face, wiping at the blood streaked across his forehead and at the long cut on his cheek and the gross yellow gunk. He couldn't do much for his eyes besides splashing cold water on them to try and lessen the swelling. He was lucky he was drunk, or else that would've hurt like a mother. 

He took a paper towel and ripped it into two little pieces. He stuck both pieces up either nostril to clog up the blood. Feeling just as presentable as always, he strolled out of the bathroom. The beater's were gone, and the bar had been cleaned out. Only two people reminded; the bartender who was wiping down the bar and Chris, who was sitting at the only table that wasn't knocked over, his hands folded expectingly on his stomach. 

Jim made his way over and plopped down, fixing the clog in his nose.

After the boring conversation that somehow sparked something like a calling deep inside Jim, Chris left. However, he left a little figurine on the table, its silver paint glinting in the light. Jim reached down and scooped up the ship figurine, turning it over in his hands. 

That was the day his life changed forever.

**Author's Note:**

> Please Review!


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